A federal lawsuit challenging the underlying data of the 2020 U.S. Census has been filed in a Florida federal court by two young Republican organizations. The plaintiffs in this case, with potential national implications, are the University of South Florida College Republicans and its President, Michael Fusella, individually, along with the Pinellas County Young Republicans and its President, Parisa Mousavi, individually. The addresses associated with these plaintiffs fall within Florida’s 14th Congressional District (represented by a Democrat) and the 15th Congressional District (represented by a Republican). The suit names the federal officials responsible for the data collection as defendants: Howard W. Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce, and Ron S. Jarmin, Acting Director of the U.S. Census Bureau. The plaintiffs seek: 1) a declaration that the 2020 Census report was unlawful due to the use of statistical methodologies; 2) mandatory relief requiring the creation of a new 2020 Census report without these methods; and 3) an injunction preventing the methods from being used in the 2030 Census.
The Complaint
The complaint outlines several core arguments against the Census Bureau’s use of statistical tools, resulting in the data used for congressional and local redistricting in Florida being flawed. The plaintiffs allege that the Bureau implemented two legally prohibited statistical methods: “Group Quarters Imputation,” a statistical method used to estimate populations based on “sampling without actual enumeration,” and “Differential Privacy,” a noise injection system that systematically distorts Census data. The lawsuit argues that the “use of statistical methods in the 2020 Census means the apportionment was not based solely on an actual and complete enumeration” of population, violating the “Actual Enumeration Clause” of the U.S. Constitution (Art. I, § 2, Cl. 3) and Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (U.S. Const. Art. XIV, § 2). Furthermore, the complaint claims that the challenged methodologies violated federal law (13 U.S.C. § 195) by “creating population estimates through regression analysis and statistical inference rather than actual enumeration of persons”. This distortion allegedly resulted in the Commerce Secretary and Census Director having “directly aggrieved plaintiffs by basing Florida’s apportionment of congressional districts on an unconstitutional and unlawful methodology”.
Statistical “Noise” Allegations
It is important to note that the allegations regarding Differential Privacy (DP) affecting congressional reapportionment are likely flawed, as this method did not apply to the state total population counts used for initial apportionment. The U.S. Census Bureau clearly states in its official literature that “Differential privacy is not applied to the apportionment count”. The state population counts used to apportion seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are total counts of residents for each state, and “Neither differential privacy nor any other form of statistical noise is applied to those counts,” according to the Bureau. Thus, the apportionment counts released in April 2021 “were not subject to these new confidentiality procedures and were the actual enumerated population counts for each state”. The DP procedures are primarily applied to the Redistricting Data (P.L. 94-171) Summary File, which is released later and used for drawing local district lines within states; however, the state population totals are “invariant,” or not changed from the apportionment totals.
“Group Quarters” Counts
Plaintiffs may find firmer ground in their challenge as it relates to Group Quarters imputation (GQI). Unlike the DP claim, the complaint’s focus on Group Quarters Count Imputation engages a real, documented, 2020 change driven by the pandemic’s disruption of prisons, dorms, and similar facilities. The Bureau created a post-collection GQ imputation procedure in late 2020 to address occupied facilities with zero usable counts, using type – and state-specific methods (e.g., ratio‐based imputation using auxiliary data, allocation of campus totals to missing dorms) and excluding several transient service-based sites from imputation. The plaintiffs allege that GQI, deployed by an ad hoc team in February 2021, constituted prohibited statistical sampling by “ascrib[ing] fictional people to facilities that were legitimately empty on Census Day 2020 using mathematical models rather than counting real residents”.These COVID-era collection gaps and the “new” imputation workflow are well-documented. The Bureau later published a technical report summarizing the imputation’s scale and guardrails. Whether those steps comply with statutory limits may be a legitimate legal question.
On Oct. 8, 2025, the district judge formally referred the case to the 11th Circuit Chief Judge to constitute a three-judge panel following the plaintiff’s motion for a panel that was filed with the complaint. Read more coverage in the Associated Press, NPR Florida, and the Boston Herald.
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